The Informational Economy of Vaudeville and the Business of American Entertainment

2021 ◽  
Vol 95 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-446
Author(s):  
Samuel E. Backer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Internal Market ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Informational Economy ◽  
Analyze Data

In the early twentieth century, vaudeville was the most popular theatrical form in the United States. Operating before the rise of mechanically reproduced entertainment, its centralized booking offices moved tens of thousands of performers across hundreds of stages to an audience of millions. Designed to gather and analyze data about both audiences and performers, these offices created a complex informational economy that defined the genre—an internal market that sought to transform culture into a commodity. By reconstructing the concrete details of these business practices, it is possible to develop a new understanding of both the success of the vaudeville industry and its influence on the evolution of American mass culture.

A Century of America on Chinese Screens

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiwei Xiao
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Print Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
American People ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chinese Films ◽  
New Millennium

AbstractNo serious study has been published on how Chinese filmmakers have portrayed the United States and the American people over the last century. The number of such films is not large. That fact stands in sharp contrast not only to the number of "China pictures" produced in the United States, which is not surprising, but also in contrast to the major role played by Chinese print media. This essay surveys the history of Chinese cinematic images of America from the early twentieth century to the new millennium and notes the shifts from mostly positive portrayal in the pre-1949 Chinese films, to universal condemnation during the Mao years and to a more nuanced, complex, and multi-colored presentation of the last few decades.

American Legal Thought in Transatlantic Context, 1870-1914

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Rabban
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Historical School ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Sociological Jurisprudence

Most American legal scholars have described their nineteenth-century predecessors as deductive formalists. In my recent book, Law’s History : American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History, I demonstrate instead that the first generation of professional legal scholars in the United States, who wrote during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, viewed law as a historically based inductive science. They constituted a distinctive historical school of American jurisprudence that was superseded by the development of sociological jurisprudence in the early twentieth century. This article focuses on the transatlantic context, involving connections between European and American scholars, in which the historical school of American jurisprudence emerged, flourished, and eventually declined.

scholarly journals PLAYING ON UNCLE SAM'S TEAM: AMERICAN CHILDHOODS DURING WORLD WAR I

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mischa Honeck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
World War I ◽  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Childhood And Youth ◽  
Constructions Of Childhood

If World War I has interested historians of the United States considerably less than other major wars, it is also true that children rank among the most neglected actors in the literature that exists on the topic. This essay challenges this limited understanding of the roles children and adolescents played in this transformative period by highlighting their importance in three different realms. It shows how childhood emerged as a contested resource in prewar debates over militarist versus pacifist education; examines the affective power of images of children—American as well as foreign—in U.S. wartime propaganda; and maps various social arenas in which the young engaged with the war on their own account. While constructions of childhood and youth as universally valid physical and developmental categories gained greater currency in the early twentieth century, investigations of young people in wartime reveal how much the realities of childhood and youth differed according to gender, class, race, region, and age.

Science as the Key to Modern Progress

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Motoe Sasaki
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The United States ◽  
Women Missionaries ◽  
New Women ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Modernization Process

This chapter shows how the notion of modern science brought to China by American New Women missionaries in the form of medicine and nursing generated concrete responses from their Chinese counterparts. The notion of science as a universally applicable and fundamentally egalitarian element for the development of a modern society and its constituents was increasingly influential in both the United States and China during the early twentieth century. Consequently, American New Women missionaries were able to establish their status as scientific professionals whose expertise could contribute to China's modernization process. At the same time, however, their faith in the new notion of science brought with it the idea of “separate but equal” gender roles, which brought them into conflict with many of their male counterparts from the United States who wanted to compete with other imperial powers to gain influence in China.

An Agitator Abroad

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Clayworth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Compulsory Arbitration ◽  
Transnational Network

Patrick Hodgens Hickey, a New Zealander, was a labor activist who introduced American ideas of revolutionary industrial unionism and socialist political action to the country of his birth. Hickey grew up in rural New Zealand at a time of industrial peace under a compulsory arbitration system and initially had little interest in unions or socialism. He learned mining skills while working as an itinerant laborer in the United States, becoming part of a transnational network of mine workers. He was radicalized by his experiences of American class conflict and his involvement with the militant Western Federation of Miners. Returning to New Zealand, he became a leader of a workers’ revolt against the compulsory arbitration system in the period from 1907 through to 1914. Hickey was a key organizer of the union peak body that became the New Zealand Federation of Labour, the “Red Feds.” Following the defeats of the Waihi strike of 1912 and the Great Strike of 1913, Hickey suffered blacklisting. He went to Australia in 1915 to escape the blacklist and the threat of wartime conscription. In Australia he worked as a union activist and anticonscription campaigner. Hickey’s life and career illustrate the transnational migration of workers and their ideas in the early twentieth century.

The United States and the Central American Federation

1967 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth J. Grieb
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Central Americans ◽  
American Federation ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
American Union

The administration of Warren G. Harding found itself facing the issue of Central American Union when it assumed office in March, 1921. Central Americans had debated combination since independence, and the question came to the fore periodically, resulting in numerous attempts to reunite the isthmus. But the previous proposals had all faltered when governments favoring confederation were overthrown. The issue was periodically revived whenever renewed coups returned pro-union regimes to power in several of the countries. In this way the debate continued throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, ebbing and flowing with the frequent revolutions, coups, and counter coups that constituted Central American politics.

Hello, Gorgeous, and the Historical Lens

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Schwadron
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Performance History ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
Critical Responses ◽  
Liberation Movements ◽  
A Performance

This chapter celebrates a performance history in the United States of Jewish female physical comedy that spans nearly a century of gender and humor radicalism. It moves from early twentieth-century performances of the Red Hot Mamas Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, and Betty Boop to touring acts, movie dance scenes, and comedy sketches of the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, including spotlights on Barbra Streisand, Gilda Radner, Bette Midler, and Madeline Kahn. Specific performances showcase how these giants of comedy staged critical responses to Jewish race and class assimilation in the context of women’s liberation movements, establishing foundational techniques of today’s Sexy Jewess spectacle.

Directing History: Women, Performance and Scholarship

2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHARLOTTE CANNING
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Theatre Arts ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Primary Identification ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The emergence of the director is usually seen as a crucial moment in late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century theatre history. Traditionally, the narrative of that emergence has focused on the director as a sole heroic individual, usually male. This article questions how that figure and those practices have been historicized. That historicization process has been (and continues to be) a disciplinary demonstration of power marked by the concomitant political operations of personal, geographical, and institutional identifications and affiliations. The specific political operation explored here is that of gender as the primary identification of the figures, institutions, and arguments. The thirty-year collaboration of Edith Isaacs and Rosamond Gilder on Theatre Arts, the primary voice in the United States for the reform of the theatre during the era that saw both the emergence of the director and the celebration of that emergence as the pinnacle of theatrical achievement is the example on which the article focuses. Gilder was Isaacs's assistant and successor, and she was also the author of Enter the Actress, the first book to create a history for women in the theatre. In three parts the article demonstrates how focusing on the journal, the collaboration, and the book offer a new conception of the director's history.

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